Linda McMahon Legal Battle Grinds On

On July 10, Education Secretary Linda McMahon issued a Dear Colleague letter warning K–12 schools they risk losing federal funds if they fail to police sexual misconduct by employees.

“The Department has observed a troubling and recurring pattern in schools across the Nation of credible reports of sexual abuse and harassment by adults in positions of authority going uninvestigated, institutional cultures that protect employees over students, and administrative indifference that allows predatory conduct to fester,” she wrote.

The letter came as McMahon is defending herself against similar allegations. Decades earlier, she failed to protect minors from sexual abuse at the hands of an employee at World Wrestling Entertainment, alleges a lawsuit filed in late 2024. McMahon, alongside her husband, Vince McMahon, led WWE in various executive roles from 1980 until she stepped down to run for Senate in 2009.

The lawsuit, filed by anonymous plaintiffs against the McMahons, WWE and its parent company, TKO Group Holdings, alleged that Mel Phillips, a longtime employee, groomed and sexually abused underage boys for years—and that top company officials knew and failed to prevent it.

Now the case is slowly winding its way through federal court in Maryland. In December, U.S. District Judge James Bredar narrowed McMahon’s exposure; though eight plaintiffs claiming abuse sued McMahon and the other defendants, the judge determined that only two can move forward with claims against her. He found that the education secretary’s earliest alleged negligent act occurred in 1988, when the McMahons fired and rehired accused abuser Mel Phillips. McMahon was excluded from claims prior to that year.

The lawsuit has since moved into the discovery phase, raising the possibility that the nation’s top education official could be deposed in an effort to determine what she knew about the reported abuse.

But the defendants are also taking on the Child Victims Act, a Maryland state law passed in 2023 that eliminated the statute of limitations on civil child sex abuses cases, which allowed decades-old claims to move forward. Maryland’s highest court upheld the law against a state constitutional challenge, but defendants are now asking the court to find that applying the law retroactively violates the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and is therefore unconstitutional. That argument is still awaiting a ruling.

McMahon’s attorney, Laura Brevetti, has cast the ongoing lawsuit as baseless.

“This civil lawsuit based upon thirty-plus year-old allegations is filled with scurrilous lies, exaggerations, and misrepresentations regarding Linda McMahon,” Brevetti wrote in an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed. “We will continue to address this matter in the courtroom, where we will no doubt succeed, rather than litigate meritless allegations through the media.”

(The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed. Attorneys for the plaintiffs declined to comment.)

McMahon has sought to distance herself from Phillips, who worked for the WWE as a ring announcer and chief of its ring crew from the mid-1970s through the early ’90s.

“I never personally supervised Phillips while he was employed by WWE, nor did I direct his activities,” she stated in a court filing last year, adding that if he “committed acts of sexual abuse while in Maryland, it was certainly not at my direction nor with my knowledge.” Her attorneys have argued that the responsibility for supervising Phillips fell to WWE, not McMahon.

In addition, her legal team argued that Maryland lacked jurisdiction over McMahon, a claim Bredar rejected.

In December, Bredar also rejected the argument that McMahon could not be held responsible. He pointed to allegations that the McMahons fired Phillips in 1988 due to concerns about his behavior toward young boys, whom he recruited to work on the ring crew. The McMahons rehired Phillips weeks later and allegedly instructed him to “steer clear of kids.” Bredar noted in a ruling that if McMahon participated in the decision to rehire Phillips despite allegedly knowing the risk he posed, it could amount to negligence in her role as an executive. (Bredar also previously rejected attempts by the McMahons to unmask those claiming Phillips abused them.)

‘A Lot More Plaintiffs’

Questions about what McMahon knew—and when—have dogged her for years.

The allegations resurfaced when McMahon ran unsuccessfully for a Senate seat in Connecticut in 2010. Then Donald Trump’s transition team flagged potential concerns in his first term when McMahon was picked to lead the Small Business Administration. Multiple advocacy groups also raised concerns about the scandal when she was picked to lead the Department of Education in 2024.

(Trump has a long history with the McMahons; he hosted wrestling events at his venues and sometimes performed as an on-screen character. He was named to the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013.)

But McMahon’s own public statements indicate that the company knew about at least some of Phillips’s behavior. Many of the victim statements claim that Phillips had a foot fetish, a fixation that McMahon appeared to know about. A Connecticut TV station reported in 1993 that McMahon had said the foot fetish had become a joke within the company, and that Phillips was let go because of public relations concerns amid WWE’s slow-running investigation into his behavior. That investigation was never released. (An FBI investigation opened into alleged abuse in 1992 identified 10 potential victims but fizzled out without bringing charges against Phillips.)

Though Phillips was never criminally charged before he died in 2012, his alleged predatory behavior was an open secret in the locker room in the late ’80s, according to industry insiders. Multiple former wrestlers of that era have alluded to Phillips’s behavior in their writings and interviews, and one longtime employee also joked about his foot fetish on WWE airwaves in 1989.

Dave Meltzer, editor of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, told Inside Higher Ed that rumors about Phillips had swirled through the ’80s before becoming public in 1992. At the time, Maryland, where the Ring Boys lawsuit was filed, was not a significant focus for the company, compared to other states. Meltzer said he believes that if claims were allowed for abuse that took place in states such as New York and Pennsylvania, there would likely be “a lot more plaintiffs” involved.

As someone who has covered the wrestling industry and WWE for decades, Meltzer said the slow pace of the lawsuit seems to reflect the approach of parent company TKO. While WWE was more aggressive in court under the McMahon family, he said TKO has taken the approach of “making the other side spend as much money as possible” and dragging lawsuits out for years.

“They stall, stall, stall,” Meltzer said. “And then at the very end they settle.”